Damage Procs and PPM tweaks or changes - Suggestion thread

[Bopper]

4 minutes ago, Alouu said:

terms of single target powers, I do have these

It might help if you show the Proposed / Current graphs, to highlight where each performs in relation to each other.

[Alouu]

Yeah okay, I didnt want to dominate the thread with a post full of images but I'll wrap them in a spoiler.

[Bopper]

4 minutes ago, Alouu said:

Yeah okay, I didnt want to dominate the thread with a post full of images but I'll wrap them in a spoiler.

I think just the one would be sufficient, but a spoiler is a good idea. Show the 1PPM, 2PPM, 3.5 PPM, and 4.5PPM ratio plots, if that's what I sent you (I'll need to look)

[...]

@Alouu, @Bopper, well done. Has my vote and support. 

 

I especially enjoy the dynamic area factor. Makes it reasonable to keep fireball in a single target rotation. 

[Galaxy Brain]

Let's look at this another way, is the issue more that procs deal the same damage regardless of AT, so lower damage ATs get way more from them which leads to weirdness?

[LordXenophon]

That hardly matters, because high damage AT's benefit more from regular damage enhancements.

[...]

@Galaxy BrainThat's either a feature or a problem, depending on your perspective. Personally, I'm ok with lower damage ATs getting more "bang for your buck" from procs (ie I think its ok for different ATs to have different slotting goals). But making procs scale to AT damage modifiers (ie nerfing them on defenders) is a potentially viable solution. Won't be popular (though none of this is, I'm sure).

 

@AlouuWhat about chain powers? May be difficult to implement the dynamic area factor; at the time that damage is dealt to the first target, you may not know how many targets are going to be hit (especially with slow chain mechanics such as synaptic overload). Also, what about rain powers? If you could find a reasonable way to make procs behave nicely in location based AoEs, I suspect you'd garner a fair bit of support. 

[Coyote]

To offer a completely different suggestion on fixing the proc situation, I had thoughts about how to fix some imbalances. And they are very simple:

 

1: Add +X to the PPM for every damage proc. For example, add +1 so that all 3.5 PPM damage procs go to 4.5, etc.

2: Lower the damage proportionately to the increase in PPM, so that the default target damage per minute remains the same.

 

First Result: powers that were already constrained by PPM to have a proc chance lower than 90% do lower damage per proc, but have a higher activation chance, thus remaining at the same expected damage. However, these powers were generally not considered to be a problem... I don't think there is anyone complaining that you get more damage in an 8 second attack by putting in a proc than by putting in a pure damage IO, since most players will go for a set over a pure IO.

 

Second Result: powers that had a 90% chance or higher will end up with lower damage. These are exactly the powers that we want to rein in. Yes, you can now slot +Recharge in the power and get it to cycle faster so that you can keep the same DPS, but it still lowers DPA, and it still lowers DPE, and it costs more IO slots to enhance the Recharge. So we end up with long-recharge powers being weaker (in terms of damage) when built with a lot of procs. You might end up with an interesting situation where Char now gets slotted to get down to 12 second Recharge, and thus is better as a Hold than leaving it with a 16 second recharge... but it still does less damage, and it is now more of a balanced damage/hold power with more strength in the mez portion (due to faster recharge) and less in the damage portion, which is probably closer to the power's intended use.

 

And it's simple to implement and to calculate.

[Auroxis]

31 minutes ago, LordXenophon said:

That hardly matters, because high damage AT's benefit more from regular damage enhancements.

 

Defenders can often-times get the same amount of damage a Blaster can get out of an SO just by slotting a proc. Whether or not it "matters" is all about perspective.

 

Also it's not just about AT's. One can argue that it shouldn't be possible to turn a slow recharging, minor damage hold power into an extreme damage power that can also hold.

 

 

Edited March 12, 2020 by Auroxis

[Alouu]

1 hour ago, Vooded said:

What about chain powers? May be difficult to implement the dynamic area factor; at the time that damage is dealt to the first target, you may not know how many targets are going to be hit (especially with slow chain mechanics such as synaptic overload). Also, what about rain powers? If you could find a reasonable way to make procs behave nicely in location based AoEs, I suspect you'd garner a fair bit of support. 

For chain powers there are two alternatives:

 

1: Have a fixed Targets amount that just estimates what kind of result you would get on average, very much like the area factor does now.

2: Wait until the whole chain resolves until applying the procs.

 

For AOE rains/patches, currently the way these work is on initial cast and every 10 seconds thereafter they roll their procs based on as if the power had a recharge time of 10 seconds. Since the amount of these 10 second intervals is known beforehand (eg. in a 15 second rain you get 2, one at 0 seconds and one at 10 seconds), this is what can be done:

 

Each interval the number of targets in the patch being hit is determined, which in turn determines the area factor under my system.

This proc chance is then divided by the number of total intervals that the patch is already known to have, and then the procs are rolled. (fire off, or dont).

Of course all of these procs connected to this one power are immune to being locked-out by previous rolls they had in the same specific cast of that power (so if a proc fired on the first interval, it can still fire again on subsequent intervals), however the lockout for the next cast would begin as soon as the power activated.

So overall you get the same total chance as in a normal AOE but split over however many intervals there are in that particular power, and it wouldnt act as if the power had a recharge time of 10 seconds, rather it would use the actual recharge time of the power and just use those 10 second intervals for proc application.

 

Edited March 12, 2020 by Alouu

[Bopper]

I dont think rains or toggles need to be tweaked. They are already fixed performance and never were exploitable. You can leave those as is.

[Alouu]

That probably depends on what you mean by leave them. If my area factors were to mesh with the current 10 second recharge behaviour it would result in a nerf, so either there would need to be two area factors one for patches and one for the clicky AOEs, or the solution I just detailed.

[Bopper]

47 minutes ago, Alouu said:

That probably depends on what you mean by leave them. If my area factors were to mesh with the current 10 second recharge behaviour it would result in a nerf, so either there would need to be two area factors one for patches and one for the clicky AOEs, or the solution I just detailed.

For your proposal on patches, make lockout use a base of 4 seconds (10s/2.5), to lineup with the pulses. Using a long recharge patch that doesnt get to leverage its base recharge in its probability to proc, but is limited by its lockout isn't good.

 

Basically, my suggestion is to not use a lockout on toggles or patches.

Edited March 12, 2020 by Bopper

[Frosticus]

8 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

I want to stress this: building for procs currently does have downsides in how to sacrifice bonuses and traditional boosts depending on the power. Going against the grain in how certain powers that are traditionally situational are now great due to procs and slow recharge is also fresh for the meta.

 

Preserving some aspect of that would be great

Indeed, what I actually like about proc builds (or at least mine) is that the sacrifices you make result in some very tangible holes in the build. You spread yourself pretty thin chasing procs.

 

So when a buffer shows up, their impact is felt to a large extent.

 

Counter that to my more traditional builds that really couldn't care less if someone gives me some defense, or tohit, or recharge, or endurance. Just put down your -res and get out of the way.

 

My proc builds love   buffers because they are usually just hanging on by a thread with just enough recovery, acc, etc to get by. I'd be sad to see that go, but would ultimately just switch back to more solo-centric do everything exceedingly well builds if neccessary.

 

It will be interesting either way though. 

 

[aethereal]

8 hours ago, Alouu said:

Current System - Fireball:

 

0% Enhancement, 0% Global: Proc chance with a 3.5 PPM proc is 36.9%. Power can be used every 17 seconds. An effective proc rate of 20.83 PPM, this is 5.95x the listed value.

 

I don't get how you get a 20.83PPM from 36.9% once every 17 seconds.  I assume that you've got some baked-in assumption about number of targets?  But I don't see you specify it anywhere.

 

60 / 17 = 3.53 activations per minute.  If you had just a single target that had a 36.9% chance of activating, that would come out to 1.3 procs per minute.  So I guess we're assuming...  16 targets?  Fully saturated?  Yes, that comes out to 20.83 PPM.

 

(OH.  You call out the number of targets in your proposed system, just not the existing system).

 

I am not convinced that there is a problem with the current system in a no enhancement, no global recharge situation.  I'm somewhat unenthused by a proposal that makes procs much worse in that base case, rather than shaving off some of their effectiveness in highly globally recharged systems.

[nzer]

11 hours ago, Vooded said:

The suggestion by @nzer seems relatively elegant and simple. Easy to code, too. But it leaves us with the strange scenario of maximizing global recharge and minimizing enhanced recharge.

Not if the scale factors are set appropriately, as increasing enhanced recharge also increases the effective PPM of the proc. Eliminating the behavior you're referring to is actually the primary goal of the change.

 

11 hours ago, Alouu said:

@nzer Do you have a suggested pair of values for L and E? I tried basing my comparison table around the ones you had set to default, but since proc rate caps at 90% they barely do anything, just increasing the base recharge needed to cap rate from 14.5 seconds to 17.

I'm not sure what PPM you're using, but there's really not any reasonable way to stop long recharge powers from capping proc chance when PPMs are as high as they are on the high end (meaning >4). You could do it, but it wouldn't really be a PPM system any more.

 

Ideally PPM values would be lowered across the board, and L and E would be set such that fast recharge abilities get enough of a boost to counteract that. The values I used actually aren't too far off what you'd want, as they nearly double effective PPM for very fast recharge abilities and nearly halve it for very long recharge abilities.

 

In the absence of lowering PPMs across the board, you could get the same effect by leaving L at or near 1. That would leave effective PPM nearly the same for fast recharges and heavily nerf it for long recharges. I don't recommend that though, as it makes the listed PPMs misleading.

[Obitus]

When I first clicked on this thread, I expected to have to take a contrarian position.  I was happy to discover that my position has been stated here, several times.  But just because, I'll restate it below:

 

The current proc system certainly isn't perfect, and yes it can do some pretty wild and superficially unbalanced things, but it also provides a huge extra layer of build choice and diversity.  Prior to PPM, there were very few meaningful trade offs between offense and defense in the IO system; grab a certain amount of +recharge, cram in as much +DEF as you could find, and that was it.   +Damage buffs are/were too small to chase.

 

I think few people really appreciate how much you give up, in terms of set bonuses, to take full advantage of the PPM proc system.  There's a tension now, in every build, that simply wasn't present before.  Sure, you can say that procs disproportionately benefit certain ATs/powersets, but that's true of everything, in this game - and procs are strong enough to help everyone, if they're willing to take the trade off.

 

RE: Corruptors, FWIW I spent ages - dozens, maybe even hundreds of hours - testing various */Storm Corruptors against analogous Storm/* Defenders a few weeks ago.  My conclusion was that the Corruptors were slightly better.  I reached that conclusion because the Corruptors not only have slightly higher damage output (higher still in teams), but also because they have better ATO procs.  The +end proc in Freezing Rain, for example, allows my Ice/Storm Controller to run more-or-less perpetually without Ageless Destiny (but with Conserve Power), whereas an otherwise identical Storm/Ice Defender often finds itself gasping.  This might sound like a minor difference, and it is, but it's enough to allow me to use Clarion Destiny on the Corruptor, which IMO is non-negotiable on a high level squishy.

 

(The Defender's defensive advantage was significant, but never to a point where I couldn't massage the build to make it functionally irrelevant.  Any extra damage procs you might manage to squeeze into the Defender build are at least partially offset by the aforementioned +endurance disparity, and by the Corruptor's access to an extra purple damage proc, one that is attached to a spectacular set bonus.)

 

Point being that build discussions are complex.  They hinge on your use case and concept preferences.  Whereas before, there used to be a more or less definitive "best answer" for most builds, now there really isn't.  That's a good thing.  If you're concerned about general damage power creep, then sure, I get it, but that horse left the barn long before PPM procs arrived.  If you want to rein in offense at the high end, particularly in a full-team environment ... well, first of all, good luck, lol, but if you really are interested in reining in high-end team offense, then your first stop should probably be Incarnate powers - and not the one game system in recent memory to introduce meaningful trade offs in building.

 

Character builds are the entire point of the game, to a lot of people.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 13, 2020 by Obitus

[Bopper]

9 minutes ago, Obitus said:

When I first clicked on this thread, I expected to have to take a contrarian position.  I was happy to discover that my position has been stated here, several times.  But just because, I'll restate it here:

 

The current proc system certainly isn't perfect, and yes it can do some pretty wild and superficially unbalanced things, but it also provides a huge extra layer of build choice and diversity.  Prior to PPM, there were very few meaningful trade offs between offense and defense in the IO system; grab a certain amount of +recharge, cram in as much +DEF as you could find, and that was it.   +Damage buffs are/were too small to chase.

 

I think few people really appreciate how much you give up, in terms of set bonuses, to take full advantage of the PPM proc system.  There's a tension now, in every build, that simply wasn't present before.  Sure, you can say that procs disproportionately benefit certain ATs/powersets, but that's true of everything, in this game - and procs are strong enough to help everyone, if they're willing to take the trade off.

 

RE: Corruptors, FWIW I spent ages - dozens, maybe even hundreds of hours - testing various */Storm Corruptors against analogous Storm/* Defenders a few weeks ago.  My conclusion was that the Corruptors were slightly better.  I reached that conclusion because the Corruptors not only have slightly higher damage output (higher still in teams), but also because they have better ATO procs.  The +end proc in Freezing Rain, for example, allows my Ice/Storm Controller to run more-or-less perpetually without Ageless Destiny (but with Conserve Power), whereas an otherwise identical Storm/Ice Defender often finds itself gasping.  This might sound like a minor difference, and it is, but it's enough to allow me to use Clarion Destiny on the Corruptor, which IMO is non-negotiable on a high level squishy.

 

(The Defender's defensive advantage was significant, but never to a point where I couldn't massage the build to make it functionally irrelevant.  Any extra damage procs you might manage to squeeze into the Defender build are at least partially offset by the aforementioned +endurance disparity, and by the Corruptor's access to an extra purple damage proc, one that is attached to a spectacular set bonus.)

 

Point being that build discussions are complex.  They hinge on your use case and concept preferences.  Whereas before, there used to be a more or less definitive "best answer" for most builds, now there really isn't.  That's a good thing.  If you're concerned about general damage power creep, then sure, I get it, but that horse left the barn long before PPM procs arrived.  If you want to rein in offense at the high end, particularly in a full-team environment ... well, first of all, good luck, lol, but if you really are interested in reining in high-end team offense, then your first stop should probably be Incarnate powers - and not the one game system in recent memory to introduce meaningful trade offs in building.

 

Character builds are the entire point of the game, to a lot of people.

 

 

 

 

Well said.

[Alouu]

@Obitus Preach on brother!

 

I wonder how common the sentiment "it doesn't seem like a problem to me but if the devs are going to change it I might as well push for the least painful changes" is. It's definitely mine.

[Caulderone]

8 minutes ago, Alouu said:

I wonder how common the sentiment "it doesn't seem like a problem to me but if the devs are going to change it I might as well push for the least painful changes" is. It's definitely mine.

Hoping for us to find a solution that did exactly that was why I started the thread, although I do see the problem.

Edited March 13, 2020 by Caulderone

[Coyote]

It does seem like a problem to me.

But it doesn't seem like a MAJOR problem... almost all powers and procs in the game are fine, with a few exceptions like 16-second recharge Holds and 30-90 second recharge PBAoEs. And, on the other side, auras/patch powers are probably a bit weak with their 10 second activation period.

So I think that it needs some tweaks more than major rebuilds. And it's less likely to open up new abuses when you're tweaking an existing system where you know what the current abuses are, than doing a complete redesign.

But, in any case, I do like the idea of getting ahead of the discussion so that we can properly influence and brainwash the devs into implementing our desired changes 😉

[ScarySai]

On 3/12/2020 at 10:15 PM, Alouu said:

@Obitus Preach on brother!

 

I wonder how common the sentiment "it doesn't seem like a problem to me but if the devs are going to change it I might as well push for the least painful changes" is. It's definitely mine.

I'm in agreement, I think old sets should be updated, SS should be fixed (since they broke it) and the odd fix to major outliers is all that needs to be done for now. I don't think they should change much, but if they are going to mess with things, it's better to explain why the scalpel is a useful tool now than to have them go in with a chainsaw later on.

[Bopper]

After getting to reread Phil "Synapse" initial proposal for PPM mechanics again, I was reminded of a few things I forgot to mention with my initial post.

 

Synapse proposed using the Total Recharge in the power when calculating Proc probability, which I mentioned in my first suggestion. However I forgot to mention the fact Synapse also proposed increasing the PPM values of all the procs (this mostly didn't happen with the version we have now, but there were a couple of procs that got a minor bump up). Also, Synapse's proposal would have used the actual Area Factor (not the dampened one).

 

So if we revisit the original proposal by Synapse vs. the version we have now, the formulas would look like this:

 

Synapse: Prob = (1.5*PPM) * [Cast + BaseRch / (1 + Enhanced + Global)] / 60 / [1 + Rad * (11*Arc + 540) / 30000]

 

Current: Prob = (PPM) * [Cast + BaseRch / (1 + Enhanced)] / 60 / [1 + 0.75*Rad * (11*Arc + 540) / 30000]

 

So AoE would get hurt more by the increased AoE. All powers would get hurt by the use of global recharge, but would benefit from a 50% increase in PPM values.

 

[Auroxis]

@BopperI believe the reason that proposal didn't go through was because external recharge buffs like speed boost could lower your DPS.

[Bopper]

20 minutes ago, Auroxis said:

@BopperI believe the reason that proposal didn't go through was because external recharge buffs like speed boost could lower your DPS.

That is exactly why. The argument was people wanted to be able to control their expected performance without having other players negatively impact it with their buffs.